An Exercise in Horror

Trick-Or-Treat Animation Plays with the Walk Cycles of Different Horror Movie Characters

Beginning as a simple animation exercise, Trick-Or-Treat, is the resulting animation of the design duo, We Think Things’ cartoon experimentations.

‘We wanted to play around with different walk cycles, and how different characters move differently,’ Pascal Monaco, motion graphics director, explained to us. ‘Very soon a concept started to grow around it. Since Halloween was coming we only used horror film characters.’

The film uses a simple and minimalistic style to depict the movement of monsters going from door to door to get candy. Wanting to concentrate on movement alone, the team have opted to use colourful backgrounds to differentiate between the sceneries.

We talked animating, Halloween, and joining The Academy with Pascal:
The Plus: As this was started off as an exercise, what techniques did you learn or build on?
Pascal Monaco: By letting the characters run towards the camera, we could also play around with perspective and distortion of the limbs. Bearing in mind that we were animating in After Effects and everything was flat instead of three dimensional, faking this distortion was a new technique for us.

TP: Do you celebrate Halloween?
PM: To be honest, when we were young Halloween was not something that you celebrated in Germany. So we only knew this from TV or US films. We had similar holidays back then, but they weren’t scary or anything. I guess we’ll only be watching a scary movie and eating the sweets that the kids don’t want.

TP: You’ve just joined The Academy as members of their animating collective. What do you hope to do with them?
PM: Working together with The Academy is a great opportunity for us. Being able to get jobs in US market and maybe pitch against the big players, while meeting great new people and working on new exciting stories and ideas is a big motivation for us. We’re really looking forward to this.